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2.27.2011

there is nothing else left to do but laugh

Have you ever had so many things go wrong for you in such a short span of time that you think there's someone out to get you, that there's a grey little cloud spurting rain and lightening following you over your head or that you're in a horrible twisted dream you can't wake up from, no matter how hard you pinch yourself?

It's been like that lately. Not quite sure what's in the air, but certainly nothing positive from the universe.
After the whole Bega fiasco, it turns out that I scored a pyrrhic victory. S had the last laugh (for now!) - I was greeted by no keys to pick up (because she had dropped them off at a different spot from normal on Friday night when she left) and had to use the spare key which was a bit raw in the lock. After sufficient turning and grunting to get the door open, I walk into a living room with a theater scrub cap on the ground, a couple of cloth placemats strewn across a crumb-ridden dining table and random plastic bags/paper on the carpeted floor. My tour of the hospital-provided unit continues to the kitchen, where I'm greeted by a countertop full of old dried up blobs of various sauces and a sink literally overflowing with dirty dishes/pans that spill onto the countertop. The stove has bits of dried food around the burners and the microwave is dirty when I open it. The bedrooms only harbored tiny daddy long leg spiders, the least of my worries and disgust. The bathroom sink had a used toothbrush on one side of it, and a plastic bag with strands of hair dangling from it into the sink and some sort of plastic packaging on the other side of it. The toilet bowl's in a room all by itself and has an empty toilet paper roll and kleenex box on the floor flanking the bowl. I move onto the laundry room, to be greeted with crumpled up theater scrubs thrown in the laundry sink and I open the lid of the washing machine to be greeted by what appears to be bed linen thrown in there but not yet washed.(I poked around a bit more with one timid finger afterwards and there is UNDERWEAR in there! eeew!)

Now, can you blame me for seething after the hubby and I drive three fricking hours through 220km, most of it through rain and fog to be greeted by the appalling state of the unit S left it in!?

(On the bright side, this unit's better than my rented one and it's already all hooked up to the internet!! yay!! also on the bright side, I gots the hubby! double yay!! And triple yay for finally appearing married to everyone else because the replacement wedding band arrived and was brought up by the hubby!!)

Oh, and then there's worse.

I'm supposed to be training in orthopedics. That means bone related. I don't know which bright spark thought it would be a good idea, or an idea at all, to have the orthopedic registrar cover general surgery AND obgyn. Now, go mull on that one.

And as if things were on a roll, the hubby went and hurt himself badly and had been limping around for the past few days with a nasty wound to the elbow. Though I'm supposed to only know about bone-related injury, any wound that exudes a pool of liquid isn't too good a wound to have, no?

And the kicker for the day was the phone call I received from a colleague of mine informing me that he'd rather I hear the bad news first hand from him, rather than filtered through later on. A patient had an operation on the wrong side of the body. It was a very unfortunate chain of mini-disasters that culminated into one big horrible one and my heart sank when I heard the news. From the xrays not having markings indicating which side of the body the part was on, to the consent form having the wrong side, to the wrong body part being marked, to the demented patient pointing to the wrong side, to the patient not being clinically checked just before going into the operating theater... it all snowballed.  We're just going to have to wait and see if the family will press charges and pursue it any further.

What a weekend.

Am going to be on-call for the next two days, and then this coming weekend. Good luck to all the surgical patients who don't have orthopedic problems because all you've got is me!

Now Monday, bring it on!!

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